We're going to Hungary next month, and we have to jump through hoops to get Nikki's passport. They didn't accept her birth certificate, it was "void", so we have to wait until one arrives that cost us $65 because we added an extra $30 to the price to make sure it gets here in 5 business days. Anyway, back to the passport thing... Here's a beautiful document justifying why a Canadian passport costs $87CAD: http://www.ppt.gc.ca/support/faq.aspx?lang=eng&id=540

The fee for an adult passport is CAN$87. Of this amount, CAN$25 is used to recover the costs incurred by the Department of Foreign Affairs in providing consular services to Canadians abroad.

As for the remaining CAN$62, the breakdown is as follows:

- 47% towards security fees (e.g.: examination, guarantor checks)
- 43% towards production fees (e.g.: material, printing)
- 6% towards administration fees (e.g.: business sustaining)

Couple of questions arise:

1) Isn't the abbreviation for Canadian Dollars "CAD"

2) "For the remaining $62, the breakdown is as follows" ... 47%+43%+6% = 96% ... What? Where's the extra 4% going?

3) Let's forget the mistakes on the site, do our taxes not already pay for government employees to sit on their ass and do their job? Or is their job strictly to sit on their ass and collect good money? Any "actual" work gets added on and broken down into 47%=THEIR already paid manual labour, 43% WE pay for their ink and paper and 6% administration fee a.k.a. just to round it off to 100% .. or wait...

What a bunch of bull.

Dave and I had an idea years and years ago about a website that would show projects in the Niagara region. This new government site is close to it, but not quite as detailed as what we had in mind.
http://jui.cc/C9

Quick function to display ordinal date in cfml (eg: 1st, 2nd, 3rd)

<cffunction name='ordinalize'>
 <cfargument name='day' required='yes'>
  <cfif day eq 1 or day eq 21 or day eq 31>
   <cfreturn day&"st">
  <cfelseif day eq 2 or day eq 22>
   <cfreturn day&"nd">
  <cfelseif day eq 3 or day eq 23>
   <cfreturn day&"rd">
  <cfelse>
   <cfreturn day&"th">
 </cfif>
</cffunction>

http://golang.org/

I would've never thought that a place like this exists.
Map: http://jui.cc/ub, Homepage: http://pimaair.org/

In case you weren't following, Canada just won gold against USA. Our friend Mr. Varga was on the edge of his seat.

I made a bit of a change to jui.cc. When you go to a jui.cc URL, it'll now display a bar at the top of the page with the contents of the URL below it. For example, see the jui.cc URL for my site: http://jui.cc/1

Peter and his coworkers over at Virgo have been working all week to get a flash project working that will stream their former prime minister's speech live (2010-02-05 14:00 GMT).. It has a live twitter feed and has voting capabilities. As a programmer, stuff like this is exciting when it's on such a large scale: http://backchannel.virgo.hu/

A1, A2, A3, A4 .. etc etc. My cousin asked for some A4 size prints today and I had no idea what that actually is... so for the North American folk, here's a conversion chart lifted from Wikipedia:

ISO paper sizes in inches

Format	A	B	C
0	33.1 × 46.8	39.4 × 55.7	36.1 × 51.1
1	23.4 × 33.1	27.8 × 39.4	25.5 × 36.1
2	16.5 × 23.4	19.7 × 27.8	18.0 × 25.5
3	11.7 × 16.5	13.9 × 19.7	12.8 × 18.0
4	8.3 × 11.7	9.8 × 13.9	9.0 × 12.8
5	5.8 × 8.3	6.9 × 9.8	6.4 × 9.0
6	4.1 × 5.8	4.9 × 6.9	4.5 × 6.4
7	2.9 × 4.1	3.5 × 4.9	3.2 × 4.5
8	2.0 × 2.9	2.4 × 3.5	2.2 × 3.2
9	1.5 × 2.0	1.7 × 2.4	1.6 × 2.2
10	1.0 × 1.5	1.2 × 1.7	1.1 × 1.6

I bought 2 tickets to Hungary today. They are for April. Apparently weather is nice there late April. Anyway, we're pretty excited! This will be my second visit within 2 years.

Click on image to enlarge. Origin unknown.

http://www.yahooanswerfail.com/

I first heard about the Monty Hall Problem in grade 10 finite class... And I never understood it... Then I forgot about it. Somehow I just thought of it and realized I still don't understand. Thanks to the Wikipedia article and its illustrations, I finally get it.

Welcome to yet another "duh" moment of my life! :)

I learned something last night.. I had to move a Wordpress site from one domain to another on Dreamhost. I read online that you have to create a fresh install of Wordpress on the new domain, then copy the wp-content folder over from the old domain. Finally you have to reconfigure the wp-config.php file on the new domain to point to the old database. I did all those steps and it was still coming back with a "redirection loop error"; the site caused an infinite loop for whatever reason and was not loading.. I messed around with the .htaccess file, I went in to each table in the database to make sure the old domain wasn't referenced anywhere... no luck. Finally I went back in to the Dreamhost control panel, to the Manage Domains section (https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=domain.manage&) and edited the Web Hosting options for the new domain..

The solution was on this page. It has a section on there that asks "Do you want the www in the URL?" with the options "Leave it alone", "add www" and "remove www" ... I noticed that it was set to "add www" so I changed it to "leave it alone" and the Wordpress site finally started working.

Oh man I haven't been to thinkgeek.com in a while. I love the design changes they made. I especially like the CSS zombies that appear in the background image as you scroll to the very bottom of the page:

Bin Laden is starting to be like Jesus... appearing conveniently when people need him to appear:
http://jui.cc/AQ
(Shit... jui.cc picks the URL codes randomly and it came up with AQ for the above news article... I take back what I said... maybe Bin Laden is real and is controlling everything!)

I tried this one photo a day for 365 days thing but I only lasted 13 days legitimately :) I haven't posted since the 13th... However, I caught up with some random stuff around the kitchen and will try to continue even though it's more like a 363 day project now...

This is great, because it made me feel stupid for liking Avatar. (I still like it though.)
http://autotelic.com/avatar_-_the_metacontextual_edition

We put the Mazda back on the road. It's such a drastic difference between that car and a brand new car. So many noises, sounds... Poor thing, she's mad at me for having her off the road for 5 months.

I will (try to) take/post a photo every day this year:
http://miklos.ca/photos/tags/365

http://lottery1.sympatico.ca/Home

How come I have not seen this until now? Genius.
http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/XMAS/greeting.htm

Peter found a nicer picture of my new watch.

Source: citizenwatches.com.au

Christmas dinner at Alex's house was a success! Good work Alex for finishing your kitchen in time. (I don't think we said it but we're proud of you.) Thanks to mom and dad for all their help as well. As for presents, there were lots! Amongst all the stuff I got was a Citizen Eco-Drive watch from Nikki. This puts an end to my forever long search for watches... I think! :)

This helped me out today: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/83931-workgroup-password.html

We got a bit of snow this morning... I mean not much, but nonetheless it is a reminder of the long winter ahead of us.
See today's photo archives.

http://code.google.com/closure/

http://www.karenglaserphotography.com/

Back when Obama was 100 days in office, I made a site called howlonghasobamabeenpresident.com as sort of a gag... Not many people visit it, and I don't really expect them to - it's a gag site! Anyway it's interesting to note that in the recent weeks, people have been searching "how long has obama been president" more frequently. On October 9th, for example, 32 people found the site because they searched those keywords. Why are people searching this all of a sudden? Is it around that time when people start wondering? I guess when the answer "less than a year" isn't enough...